Reflections for 2021 & Resolutions for 2022
In year 2021, so many things that are important to my life happened. Now, I would like to break them down into categories as I used to do.
Work
I could probably say this — 2021 is the most significant year for my company, Roblox, as it finally became a public company through direct public offering (DPO) in March. I can still remember how I, and all my colleagues were so excited the day before the DPO, the day of the DPO, and actually, the following whole week. Even though I had only been in the company for one and half years by then, it was still one of the most unforgettable events in my life.
After that, I was again very fortunate to finish a few challenging projects, which helped promote me to the senior position around April. That was in fact a very important milestone to me — instead of passively dealing with assigned tasks, becoming a senior engineers means more focuses on planning and prioritization. Hopefully, in 2022, I can keep meeting the expectations set to my current position and even grow beyond it.
Forever Learning & Research
It was a bit unlucky that my participation in CFA Level 2 exam had to be delayed ever longer — somehow my registration fee could not be waived when I tried to book the November 2021 exam in order to make up the COVID-cancelled one, and the issue was only resolved after the registration deadline passed.
Due to the unexpected issue, I had no choice but to change my focus to something else. At the end, I decided to pick up a few online courses, include Project Management from Google, AWS Machine Learning Foundations from Amazon, Computer Vision from Udacity, and Deep Reinforcement Learning from Udacity. Among all the courses, Deep Reinforcement Learning course is the most inspiring one to me. One of the essential open questions in that domain is the balance between “exploitation” and “exploration”, and that is exactly the question we need to ask ourselves every single day: if you have learned something beneficial to you in the past, should you take advantage of your previous experiences or jump out of the comfort zone and try something totally different, which most likely is less beneficial. If we always live up with what we have learned in the past, then we will never improve ourselves. However, on the other hand, if we always try to explore uncharted territories, we can never utilize our knowledge and secure the benefits we could have. What a hard problem, isn’t it?
For further future learning, there are a few candidates that I can think of. Initially, I made a list of online courses to take, in preparation of gaining the required knowledge of autonomous driving, which could be my next career focus. Nonetheless, the more I learn about reinforcement learning, the more I realize I am already in a perfect position for it — Roblox provides a wonderful simulation engine for me to approximate the physics in real life. Probably I can just take advantage of that to approach one of my ultimate research goals: learning from millions of humans (players) in fully-controlled sandboxes.
Other than computer science related topics, I also had growing interests in modern physics and cosmology in the last few years. Nevertheless, it is a lot harder for me to ask the right or precise question through Google searches, not to mention the answer aggregation. A similar problem arose when I tried to learn more about the essential meaning of doing logarithm addition on negative numbers, in the “interactive learning” side project from last year. I really miss the days that there were “teachers” for me to ask any questions, no matter how imaginative or ridiculous they are.
Health
In 2021, I spent significant amount of time in taking care of my teeth, from cavity treatment, deep cleaning, root canal, and crown installation in US, to three horizontal wisdom teeth extraction in a surgery room in Taiwan. I really wish I don’t need to worry about my teeth in a brand new year.
As to the weight control, my resolution last year was to reduce one kilogram per month, with a starting point at 101.x. By the end of December this year, I am glad to announce that I am very close to achieve my original goal! Currently, my weight is around 90.x, which means that I made about 91.67% (=11/12) of the progress. For the missing last mile, I would just blame the limited space in the quarantine hotel and the delicacy of the Taiwanese food since I arrived Taiwan.
For the next year, my goal is to keep the momentum but to reduce half kilogram per month instead. Hopefully, this is again an achievable goal!
Life Perspective
When I just got graduated, there were only two things I wanted to optimize for in my life: the promotion speed and the job compensation, in order for faster net worth accumulation. Now, after almost four years, I am very lucky to reach a pretty desirable state. In the future, I would like to switch the gear and pay more attention to the impact that I could bring to the world, either through my daily work or side projects. I believe this will gradually become more rewarding than purely chasing the digital numbers in my accounts 🙂
Lastly, I really appreciate all the supports from the ones I loved and the ones that loved me. Wish all of us can keep live out who we really are and treasure the time we stay together.